Gitmo
is no longer a prison camp; it’s a state-sponsored madrassa. But that’s not
good enough for these inmates. They’re now demanding newer facilities and
easier access to lawyers. More are threatening hunger strikes and unrest if
they don’t get their way.

Before anyone gets the idea that I am going to use Gitmo to
bash the Obama administration, some of the more egregious examples date to the
Bush administration.

Take, for example, the great exercise machine kerfuffle.

Sperry explains that, in 2007 the inmates were eating so
much of the Islamically correct food that they started putting on weight. So
the camp officials decided to buy them some exercise equipment, like
treadmills. Can’t have overweight terrorists on our hands, can we?

But then, the inmates discovered that the treadmills were
made in America. To their minds that meant that the machines had been produced
by “infidels.” So the Bush administration replaced them with others that had
been made in Muslim countries.

As I say, who was running the place?

Was it too much to tell these terrorists that if they didn’t
like the exercise equipment, they could stuff it?

What would Margaret Thatcher have done? Remember when the Iron
Lady was faced with a hunger strike by IRA terrorists. She did not want to
deprive them of their dignity by force feeding them, so she let them exercise their
free choice not to eat. The consequences were predictable.

The Iron Lady was of sterner stuff than America’s
politicians.

Today’s Americans are terrified that they will incite Muslim
terrorists. Tell me, again, who is winning the great civilizational war?

Sperry quotes a former Gitmo official:

He said
they get as many as four choices of halal meals and have access to a new
$750,000 soccer field. Islamic prayer beads and rugs are now “standard issue.”
They get their choice of more than 10,000 Islamic books and videos stocked by a
Muslim librarian, who also records soccer and Arabic TV for them. They even
have their own clerics to preach to them in Arabic.

Everyone
gets a Koran, paperback or hardback, along with little hammocks to keep their
holy book from touching the ground when not in use.

Guards
are prohibited from handling the books. The Muslim librarian is “the only one
that’s allowed to touch the Korans anymore, per detainee request,” the official
said. “If I went into the Koran room and started rifling through a Koran, I
could be fired.”

But no
one gets a Bible, because the Bible could “incite” the terrorists.

Little hammocks … clearly the situation at Gitmo is worse
than anyone imagined.

If you assume that a lot of these people will eventually be
let loose, doesn’t it sound like Gitmo has been turned into a terrorist
training camp?

The worst is this:

Detainees
even persuaded prison officials to stop raising the American flag anywhere they
could see it.

The terrorists now get to dictate when and where American
soldiers can raise the American flag. Is there no end to our government’s cowardice?

If you were a detained terrorist, would you think that your
culture had won or lost? If you were imprisoned in Gitmo would you believe that
Americans were proud or ashamed of their culture, their tradition, their
nation?

Why would these prisoners, once released, not return to the
battlefield? Haven't we signaled clearly that we are willing to submit to their
culture?

Considering that the problem with many immigrant Muslims is
the failure to assimilate, doesn’t the Gitmo policy tell Muslims that they do
not have to, because America will accommodate them… even if it means not waving
the flag in public.

If you think that that is bad, the officials running Gitmo believe
that they have not done enough to create good conditions for their terrorist
detainees.

Sperry recounts the new plans, along with the astronomical
cost of holding these prisoners:

So the
Pentagon is considering plans for a $150million overhaul to what is already the
world’s most costly prison per capita. Each inmate at Gitmo costs roughly
$800,000 a year to detain, for a total annual operating budget of more than
$170 million.

The
military already has approved construction projects, including a new $11
million hospital and medical units for detainees, along with a $10 million
“legal meeting complex,” where lawyers and human-rights groups can huddle with
detainees.

Supposedly, this is all about PR. The American government is
worried about its image. It is concerned that the wrong image will provoke
anti-American riots in, say, Benghazi.

Our policy, dating to the Bush administration seems to
involve a goodly dose of appeasement. Perhaps our government is trying to
generate some positive press. Perhaps it is trying not to incite civil
liberties advocates. Perhaps it is worrying about the opinion of sophisticated
European intellectuals.

Then again, we might be trying to influence all of the
incipient terrorists out there.

Do you think that, upon hearing out that we are willing bow
down to the demands of Islam, they will fear the wrath of America? Or will they
feel that they need to get more involved in the effort to bring down an Empire
that seems no longer to be willing to defend itself?

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Let’s hope it’s true, but there seems to be only one place
left where skin color really does matter: the beach. Or, maybe, the pool.

Now that vacation time is upon us, more and more people will
start obsessing about their skin color. Some will go to the beach, while others
will lounge around the pool, slathered with sunscreen, inhaling the chlorine
fumes.

I have yet to figure out why people who douse themselves in
SPF 75 worry about their tan.

Unfortunately, the sun is not your friend. It is not your
skin’s friend and it is certainly not your face’s friend.

Too much sunshine applied indiscriminately to your skin will
turn it into leather. Do you know how much moisturizer it takes to make that
leather-like texture feel like soft skin?

Too much sun applied to your face will produce a script of lines
and wrinkles. So much so that, if you are a true postmodern you will run
screaming to your local cosmetic surgeon.

Fewer and fewer people believe in God, but pagan idolatry is
alive and well. Citizens sport their atheism with pride, but they worship at
the altar of the sun god.

It’s what’s wrong with our minds. We worship the
uninhibited glory of youth, yet we conspire with the sun to look older than our
years.

In the name of vanity we do serious damage to our skins,
only to do penance by squandering a small fortune on lotions, potions and masks.
When that fails we move up to Botox and face lifts.

All the while we forget that the best way to have our skin
age gracefully and healthily is… to stay out of the sun. Next best is to wear
sunscreen.

How can you age gracefully, without trying too hard to altar your appearance to the point where no one knows who you are? Go to the movies;
go to the library; sit under a shade tree. You will not look like a tomato or
an orange; your skin will not feel like a football; you will not need to numb your face with Botox, suffer cosmetic surgery
or submit to hours of facials.

Keep in mind, when those cosmetic treatments work their
magic they will make your face look like a Noh mask… porcelain and immobilized.

Ironically, you will think to yourself that the medical
interventions will help you to save face. Unfortunately, when your face is
loses its character lines, to the point of becoming barely recognizable, you
will have lost face.

In olden days, age lines on your face denoted maturity,
wisdom and experience. A young face might be more pleasing aesthetically and
erotically, but if your face lacks the right kinds of lines you will look like you
have not lived very long or very much. Or else, you will look like a simple-minded poser.

Surely, the great historical competition of our time is between youth-worshiping
America and a China that practices filial piety.

For all the prattle about the love of nature, a cult to
youth stands in defiance to natural progression. Once the glory
days of your youth have passed, nature will age you… inevitably and inexorably.

A nation that worships youth is setting itself up for
failure. If youth is the gold standard, most of your life is downhill. It’s
depressing. If you believe that your best days were when you were a young adult, time will put
more and more distance between you and your best days.

So, add some Prozac to the potions and lotions and cosmetic
procedures.

You probably don’t want to, but you might remember the
dancing hospital beds that filled your television screen during the opening
ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.

I am hardly an aficionado of dance, but it struck me as a
major embarrassment. In 2008 the Chinese government put on a show to announce
its arrival on the world stage. In 2012 the British government was telling the
world that the sun was setting on its famed Empire.

If you count socialized medicine among your greatest modern
accomplishments and trumpet your pride by putting on an aesthetically pathetic
show of dancing beds… you days are numbered.

It’s a long way from the Industrial Revolution and liberal
democracy.

While we are here, allow me to recall, yet again, the
immortal words of a man who, by his own account, has never been wrong. I am
speaking of Paul Krugman.

At a time when America was feverishly debating Obamacare,
Krugman stepped forth to announce that he had done all the relevant research,
consulted all of the studies and concluded that stories about the deficiencies of the British health care system were lies.

In his immortal words:

In
Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors.
We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories
are false.

Don’t ask how he knew. He’s Paul Krugman, so you
must take him at his word. Isn’t he an expert in the functioning of the British
National Health Service?

One doubts that Krugman really cares about how anything
works in practice. Do you recall an instance where he was willing to admit that
he was wrong about anything? If his plans do not work, he blames Republicans.

Meantime, the Daily
Mail recently reported that, at hospitals run by the National Health
Service, patients are starving to death or suffering dehydration because the
nurses have neither the time or the inclination to feed them.

How many people are starving in the NHS? Around one a day
over the past four years. Many are severely dehydrated, because providing good
medical care does not seem to involve providing patients with food and water.

As many
as 1,165 people starved to death in NHS hospitals over the past four years
fuelling claims nurses are too busy to feed their patients.

The
Department of Health branded the figures 'unacceptable' and said the number of unannounced
inspections by the care watchdog will increase.

According
to figures released by the Office for National Statistics following a Freedom
of Information request, for every patient who dies from malnutrition, four
more have dehydration mentioned on their death certificate.

Critics
say nurses are too busy to feed patients and often food and drink are placed
out of reach of vulnerable people.

In
2011, 43 patients starved to death and 291 died in a state of severe malnutrition,
while the number of patients discharged from hospital suffering from
malnutrition doubled to 5,558.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Once upon a time we Americans were anguished to learn that certain people hated us. What could we have done to deserve
such rancor? For those who believed that we must have done something to provoke
the anger, it was puzzling.

“Why do they hate us?”
became a battle cry for therapy. If only we knew why they hated
us, we could change, and then, mirable dictu,
they would cease to hate us. Neat, clean, precise… problem solved.

At some future point we will wonder why we were worrying
ourselves about why Islamist terrorists hate us. It takes very little acumen to see that they
hate us because they are in the hate business, and we happen to be the biggest
target.

That wasn’t too difficult, now was it?

As it happens, the Obama administration has done its level
best to ensure that the Muslim world likes us. Make that… really, really likes
us.

In Egypt it has enjoyed a limited success. The Islamists who
are running that sad country like us. They like us a lot.

But then, somehow or other, many people in newly democratic
Egypt still hate us. Only, it's not the same people. Those who hate us now comprise the democracy advocates and the Christians
who are being harassed and persecuted by the government that we have empowered.

Anger
against the U.S. is nothing new in the Middle East, and neither are conspiracy
theories in which Washington plays a strong, silent hand.

But
rarely have such theories placed U.S. influence so squarely behind Islamists
such as Mr. Morsi, a former leader in the powerful Muslim Brotherhood that the
White House helped to subdue for decades by backing successive anti-Islamist
autocrats.

In Egypt, people who love freedom hate America, because,
after all, America has put itself on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe
that’s what the administration meant when it called for a foreign policy reset.

Egyptians pay close attention to American diplomacy. They
saw our policy clearly when Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt:

Immediately
after the Brotherhood cited its own unofficial tallies in announcing that Mr.
Morsi had won presidential elections in June 2012, then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton angered anti-Islamist politicians when she called on Egyptian
authorities to "support the democratic transition" and yield power to
an elected president.

Activists
were further vexed when Mr. Morsi announced a constitutional declaration
awarding himself power over the judiciary. The announcement sparked suspicion
because it came immediately after Mrs. Clinton visited Cairo and activists complained
the U.S. didn't condemn Mr. Morsi's action.

True to its policy, the Obama administration appointed an
ambassador to Egypt who is either incompetent or is very fond of the
Brotherhood.

The Journal reports:

But
comments by Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, earlier in June at an
Egyptian pro-democracy organization have sparked a renewed eruption of
anti-American sentiment in the secular media.

In an
effort to "set the record straight" about the U.S. relationship with
the Brotherhood, Ms. Patterson said the White House supported Mr. Morsi because
he was fairly elected and poured cold water on protesters' plans to oust him on
June 30.

"Some
say that street action will produce better results than elections. To be
honest, my government and I are deeply skeptical," Ms. Patterson told the
audience of mostly activists. "More violence on the streets will do little
more than add new names to the lists of martyrs. Instead, I recommend Egyptians
get organized."

The
backlash from activist corners was fast and fierce. George Ishaq, a prominent
Egyptian Christian and longtime pro-democracy campaigner attacked Ms. Patterson
on the popular talk show "The Issue" on Al Hayat, Egypt's
most-watched satellite channel.

"She
is an evil lady who is creating divisions. How is this any of her
business?" Mr. Ishaq said of Ms. Patterson. "If I saw her walking
down the street I would tell her, 'shut up and mind your own business.' "

In a
profile of Ms. Patterson titled "The Brotherhood's Ambassador," the
anti-Islamist newspaper Al Watan called her a "pariah" among Egypt's
political opposition. Secularist former parliamentarian Mustafa Al Bakri
announced on television that Ms. Patterson had been recruited into a
Brotherhood "sleeper cell."

A
leader in the pro-democracy group The National Association for Change called
Ms. Patterson's comments "provocative" and dangerous.

The new American policy toward s Egypt is based, Caroline Glick suggests, on hope and a prayer. It is certainly not based on American
interest, American values or an understanding of the situation in Egypt:

The
Obama administration supports the Morsi government even as it persecutes
Christians. It supports the Muslim Brotherhood even though the government has
demonstrated economic and administrative incompetence, driving Egypt into
failed state status. Egypt is down to its last few cans of fuel. It is facing
the specter of mass starvation. And law and order have already broken down
entirely. It has lost the support of large swathes of the public. But still Obama
maintains faith.

So, in Egypt, the Obama administration has succeeded to
getting our friends, the people who share our values to hate us. The nicest
thing we can say is that it’s amateur hour in American foreign policy.

It’s probably too late, but it would be nice if the
President of the United States and the Secretary of State could stop contradicting each other.

Here are some statements that Secretary of State Kerry made
about NSA leaker Edward Snowden. He demonstrated appropriate outrage and
seriousness:

I
believe that he has betrayed his country, because he took an oath. He
swore that he would uphold the secrecy. He was given access to documents
based on that trust and he violated that trust. And he hasn’t violated it
in any way similar – nothing similar – to Daniel Ellsberg or somebody who was
revealing a government that was actually lying or that had a completely
distorted view of something going on. This man just took real information
and put it out there because he happens to believe something that is not, in
fact, justified by the facts.

And this:

And so I think he has put counterterrorism at risk, he has put individuals at
risk, and it may well be that lives will be lost in the United States because
terrorists now have knowledge of something that they need to avoid, that they
didn’t have knowledge of before he did this.

Finally:

What I
see is an individual who threatened this country and put Americans at risk through
the acts that he took. People may die as a consequence of what this man did. It
is possible the United States will be attacked because terrorists may now know
how to protect themselves in some way or another that they didn't know before.
This is a very dangerous act.

Yesterday, at a press conference in Senegal, President Obama
tried to lower the tone, because, after all, this Snowden business was
distracting the world from what really mattered: President Obama’s trip to
Senegal. And we can’t have that.

Note the casual, off-hand tone that Obama adopts, as he
reduces Snowden to a “twenty-nine-year-old hacker,” or as he explains that he
has not called President Xi or President Putin because he “shouldn’t have to.”

Apparently, Obama believes that his presence alone should
suffice to motivate people to do the right thing.

One can contrast Obama's studied insouciance with the anger of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez who said yesterday that if Ecuador gives Snowden asylum it will suffer severe economic penalties.

Next, Obama explains that we do lots of business with Russia
and China. He is not going to let some no-account hacker get in the way of
business. Why should the “social justice” president bargain away a business
deal in order to punish someone who his Secretary of State has excoriated as a traitor?

Perhaps he does not understand that Snowden and future
Snowdens are being given a pass to betray government secrets.

It’s the Hillary Clinton attitude toward justice. Once the
ambassador was killed in Benghazi, nothing was going to bring him back, so why
bother.

With
respect to Mr. Snowden, we have issued through our Justice Department very
clear requests to both initially Hong Kong and then Russia that we seek the
extradition of Mr. Snowden. And we are going through the regular legal channels
that are involved when we try to extradite somebody. I have not called
President Xi personally or President Putin personally. And the reason is
because, number one, I shouldn't have to. This is something that routinely is
dealt with between law enforcement officials in various countries. And this is
not exceptional from a legal perspective.

Number
two, we've got a whole lot of business that we do with China and Russia. And
I'm not going to have one case of a suspect who we're trying to extradite
suddenly being elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and
dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues simply to get a guy
extradited, so that he can face the Justice system here in the United States.

I get
why it's a fascinating story from a press perspective. And I'm sure there will
be a made-for-TV movie somewhere down the line. But in terms of U.S. interests,
the damage was done with respect to the initial leaks. And what I'm really
focused on is making sure, number one, that we are doing everything we can to
prevent the kind of thing that happened at the NSA from happening again,
because we don't know right now what Mr. Snowden's motives were except for
those things that he said publicly. And I don't want to prejudge the case, but
it does show some pretty significant vulnerabilities over at the NSA that we've
got to solve. That's number one.

So I am
interested in making sure that the rules of extradition are obeyed. Now, we
don't have an extradition treaty with Russia, which makes it more complicated.
You don't have to have an extradition treaty though to resolve some of these
issues. There have been some useful conversations that have taken place between
the United States government and the Russian government. And my continued
expectation is that Russia or other countries that have talked about
potentially providing Mr.Snowden asylum recognize that they are part of an
international community, and that they should be abiding by international law.
And we'll continue to press them as hard as we can to make sure that they do
so.

But one
last thing, because you asked a final question -- no, I'm not going to be
scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker.

If you were wondering why world leaders do not respect our president,
now you know.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

It is an article of feminist faith, if not dogma, that there
is no significant difference between the male and the female body. If a woman
fails the physical exam for the fire department or Army Rangers that can only
mean that the test was designed to discriminate against women.

It’s not an academic issue. If the nation, through its
political leaders believes that women should be put in combat positions on the
front lines of military campaigns, the debate has become policy.

Often, this discussion revolves around the question of
whether male and female sexuality are fundamentally the same or fundamentally
different.

Yet, there is another way of measuring, not merely the
difference between male and female bodies but the consequences of feminists teaching women that, anything a man can do they can and should be doing it too.

Take alcohol. It turns out that today’s liberated woman,
especially today’s educated women is more likely to consume too much alcohol.
Female alcohol syndrome is becoming an important health issue.

Feminist thinkers have been cheering the college girls on.
College professor and philosopher Nancy Bauer describes today’s
liberated and empowered college women in these terms:

If
there’s anything that feminism has bequeathed to young women of means, it’s
that power is their birthright. Visit an American college campus on a
Monday morning and you’ll find any number of amazingly ambitious and talented
young women wielding their brain power, determined not to let anything —
including a relationship with some needy, dependent man — get in their
way. Come back on a party night, and you’ll find many of these same girls
(they stopped calling themselves “women” years ago) wielding their sexual
power, dressed as provocatively as they dare, matching the guys drink for drink
— and then hook-up for hook-up….

When
they’re on their knees in front of a worked-up guy they just met at a party,
they genuinely do feel powerful — sadistic, even.

You’ve come a long way, baby!!

Of course, most feminists do not encourage young women to
become alcoholics or to be down on their knees to service worked-up boys, but any woman who takes seriously the notion that gender
differences are merely a social construct will have little reason to believe
that she should systematically drink less than a man.

Obviously, Bauer would never take responsibility for the
consequences of her advice, but she would do herself and everyone else a favor
if she apologized for drawing a picture of a liberated woman that puts that
woman on the road to alcoholism.

Indeed,
more women are drinking now than at any time in recent history, according to
health surveys. In the nine years between 1998 and 2007, the number of women
arrested for drunken driving rose 30%, while male arrests dropped more than 7%.
Between 1999 and 2008, the number of young women who showed up in emergency
rooms for being dangerously intoxicated rose by 52%. The rate for young men,
though higher, rose just 9%.

These
numbers are not driven solely by young women living it up on spring break. A
recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of binge drinking—that
is, having four or more drinks for women or five or more for men within two
hours—revealed a surprising statistic. While the greatest number, 24%, of
binge-drinking women are college-age, 10% of women between 45 and 64 said they
binge drink—and so did 3% of women older than 65. The college-age binge
drinkers and the senior binge drinkers overdid it with a similar frequency,
about three times a month.

Welcome to the world of gender parity. The Journal is too
modest to say that feminism has anything to do with this alarming trend, but it feels a need to report that, when it comes to alcohol, the male body and the female body are
not created equal. For those who believe in science, it explains:

In one
sense, the rising rates of alcohol consumption by women are a sign of parity.
But this is one arena in which equal treatment yields unequal outcomes. Women
are more vulnerable than men to alcohol's toxic effects. Their bodies have more
fat, which retains alcohol, and less water, which dilutes it, so women drinking
the same amount as men their size and weight become intoxicated more quickly.
Males also have more of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which breaks down
alcohol before it enters the bloodstream. This may be one reason why
alcohol-related liver and brain damage appear more quickly in heavy-drinking
women than men.

Strangely, alcohol also seems to enhance traditional gender
roles:

Scientists
are continuing to explore the biochemical differences in the way that alcohol
affects men and women. Studies show that after drinking, men report feeling
more powerful, often overstating their capabilities and accomplishments, while
women say that it makes them feel more affectionate, sexy and feminine.

Is it not ironic when women drink too much because they
believe that they are equal to men they discover that alcohol provokes feelings
of… femininity.

Surely, it would be better if women could find another way
to feel more feminine.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

It’s one of the great modern questions: how do you keep
desire alive in a long-term relationship? You know, in a marriage.

Many young people believe that if they have found “the one” and if they
are both totally in love, that desire will always be there. Older people know
better, but prefer not to disabuse the young of their illusions.

Now, Daniel Bergner offers what seems to be a paradoxical
suggestion: the belief in, expectation of and longing for unconditional love is
“the ultimate assassin of desire” in such relationships.

The idea feels so strange that it is probably true.

After all, if the therapy culture is prescribing
unconditional love as the cure for all that ails you, you can be confident that
unconditional love is a problem.

Bergner has just written a book called What Do Women Want?, so he has done what we like to call field research.

He formulates his idea in a chatty paragraph:

What
I've been saying—and what, all self-mockery aside, I do believe, based on the
years I've spent listening to researchers and therapists and just living
life—is that the longing for unconditional love is the enemy of lust, that the
ideal of being loved no matter what is the ultimate assassin of desire in
long-term relationships. From our parents we can hope for the unconditional,
but with our partners we have to constantly earn love and win lust or love will
fade and lust will disappear for both partners.

But, Bergner asks, why should this be so?

I would say that unconditional love is infantilizing and
patronizing, and that it is very difficult to continue to lust after someone
who treats you like a child.

I would also say that someone who loves you unconditionally
must ignore both your virtues and your vices. It may feel like win/win, but it
is also lose/lose.

If you gain nothing by doing well and lose nothing by doing poorly,
then you are being diminished and demeaned. You are being told that it doesn’t
matter what you do. And if it doesn’t matter what you do, why do anything?

Someone who loves you unconditionally will love you even if
you are a scoundrel, even if you betray his or trust, even if you are disloyal.

In your experience, is such behavior a turn-on or a
turn-off?

To look more closely, I would modify only one point in Bergner’s
argument. Perhaps this shows how old I am, but, in times of yore, unconditional
love was the province of mothers, more than fathers.

Traditionally, mothers have loved their children unconditionally while fathers expect their children to earn
their affection.

To clarify the point, a child expects to be loved and
nurtured by his mother, regardless. At
least at first, at a time when a child is most vulnerable and most in need of
his mother, she will naturally love him unconditionally. As he grows, her love
will also need to be earned, but he will always know that, if push comes to
shove, his mother will love him no matter what.

A mother’s nurturance does not need to be earned. It does
not require compensation. In many ways, it’s instinctive behavior and it is, like virtue, its own reward.

When it comes to fathers, things change. A child really needs
his father to be proud of him, and pride
must be earned through achievement.

Won’t his mother also want to be proud of him? Yes, she
will. And won’t she expect him to earn her pride? Yes, she will. For her, however, her feelings of pride will never eradicate her willingness to offer unconditional love.

The more a child functions in a social world, the more he
will need to learn how to earn love, not to expect it to be given with no strings
attached.

In truth, a child will be better motivated to improve his behavior
if he knows that his mother will always love him but that his father will
not.

A child who receives unconditional love from both parents
will be more likely to believe that he can get away with anything. A child who
receives conditional love from both parents will be more likely to believe that
he must never fail.

Mothers love their children unconditionally because their
relationship normally contains no sexual desire. As a sidelight, if this is
true, then Freud’s belief that sexual desire originates in a taboo against
incest turns out to be nonsense.

Mothers nurture; fathers socialize. Of course, mothers also
work to socialize, but they never lose the feeling of nurturance.

But, what happens when a school offers children unconditional
love. It becomes a nurturing, but not a socializing environment. If it
is stoking their self-esteem and protecting them from the possibility of
failing is, pardon the expression, mothering them. This will naturally make it more difficult for these children to take
their place in society. It will also make it more difficult for them to experience the
pride in achievement.

If the possibility of failure has been eliminated, then the
chance of building pride, to say nothing of character, has also been
eliminated.

If you cannot fail you cannot succeed either. You will
become demoralized, feeling that you gain nothing by getting things right. Once
you know that you cannot get it right or wrong you are more likely to give up,
thus falling into depression.

As we know, depression stifles sexual desire. When people
are depressed they lost their confidence and their pride, but they also,
notably, lose their appetite, for food and for lust.

If a woman offers a man unconditional love she is,
effectively, treating him like a child. This level of disrespect will
demoralize him and cause his desire to wane. No man wants to be treated like a
child and no man lusts after a woman who treats him that way.

If a woman allows a man to believe that she will forgive him
anything, she is sacrificing her self-respect by trying to make herself purely
motherly.

We expect that a wife will stand by her husband in time of
trouble. But that does not mean that she should stand by him no matter
what.

If she stands with him it’s not because she loves him
unconditionally but because she has a moral obligation to remain loyal, even to
a fault.

Loyalty, given and received, might be confused with unconditional
love, but loyalty has limits. If someone betrays your trust, you are under no
moral obligation to continue to be loyal.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Does a string acquire any special virtue by finding its way between your teeth and scraping off the plaque that is accumulating there? Is a string still a string when it is dental floss?

There’s nothing very sexy about dental floss when it is used
as it is intended to be used. I will grant an exception for the floss that is
used to construct thong bikinis.

Whatever your dentist says, however much it costs you to
correct the problems that could have been prevented by flossing you are still
unlikely to do it.

You had enough trouble adopting an exercise regimen.
Flossing seems like one good habit too many.

Think about it. You don’t need a gym membership or special
fashionable clothing in order to floss your teeth. You do not congregate with
other people to practice your flossing moves. No celebrities are doing public
service announcements about the importance of flossing. There are no ads
showing the disease-producing bacteria that have taken up residence just below your gum line. No one is making very much money in the floss
market.

Beyond the fact that your dentist tells you to floss your
teeth every time you have a checkup, you have no outside support to sustain
your resolution to make a habit of flossing your teeth on a daily basis. No one is going to look at you and exclaim that you didn't floss last night.

Cosmetic dentistry is all the rage. People are falling over
themselves to make their teeth look like Chicklets. But, when it comes to
dental hygiene we are less than avid to do what it takes to make our gums be as
clean as our teeth are white.

Nevertheless, flossing will save your teeth; it will save
your gums; it will save you money; it might even save you from heart disease
and stroke.

Dental research suggests that it might be more important
than brushing.

The connection between gum disease and cardiovascular
disease has not been established definitively, but the evidence suggests that
people who suffer from gum disease are also more likely to have heart disease.
It seems to be as good an indicator of heart disease as high cholesterol.

If you're
worried about heart
disease, you can easily spend thousands of dollars each year trying to
prevent it, paying hand over fist for prescription medicines, shelves of
healthy cookbooks, fitness machines
for your home, and a gym membership.

Or
maybe not. A number of recent studies suggest that you may already have a cheap
and powerful weapon against heart
attacks, strokes, and other heart disease conditions. It costs less than $2
and is sitting on your bathroom counter. It is none other than the humble
toothbrush.

"There
are a lot of studies that suggest thatoral health, and gum
disease in particular, are related to serious conditions like heart
disease," says periodontist Sally Cram, DDS, a spokeswoman for the
American Dental Association.

So can
preventing periodontal disease, a disease of the gums and bone that support the
teeth, with brushing and flossing prevent heart disease?

The
evidence isn't clear yet, experts say, but it's intriguing. According to the
American Academy of Periodontology, people with periodontal disease are almost
twice as likely to have coronary artery disease (also called heart disease).
And one study found that the presence of common problems in the mouth,
including gum disease (gingivitis), cavities, and missing teeth, were as good
at predicting heart disease as cholesterol
levels.

But flossing takes more effort than popping a Lipitor, so
most Americans believe that they are taking care of themselves by taking pills. They make excuses for not flossing.

For those among many other reasons, few people are going to
look very closely at Jillian Beirne Devi’s article about how flossing saved her
finances. The title does not smack of profundity. It feels like it was channeled from The Onion.

In her article, Devi explains that the habit of flossing did
wonders for her bottom line.

She is not talking about all the money she saved on dental work, but about the
experience of acquiring a new good habit.

In his book The Power
of Habit, Charles DuHigg said that the best way to develop better habits is
to start with one, keystone habit. Once you have gotten into the habit of, say,
flossing, it is easier to develop other good habits.

Devi writes:

Keystone
habits are effective because, when you stick to them consistently, they create
"small wins," a strategy that psychologists use to inspire hope in
people who are looking to improve their lives because they help keep motivation
high when the road is long.

Following DuHigg, Devi provides us with a model for
effective therapeutic change. It’s more about changing behaviors than changing
states of mind.

Once she conquered the habit of flossing, Devi applied her
newfound skill to a different problem: her burgeoning debt. She attacked the
problem systematically and after some time, conquered it. She succeeded
because she developed new money management habits:

One
night I took a hard look at everything I owed. It was a scary figure -- I was
nearly $30,000 in debt. That night I committed to two powerful habits: checking
my balances every day, and reviewing my budget weekly. Feeling bold, I also
decided to stop using credit cards.

At
first, shifting my money patterns was an uncomfortable but necessary change --
just like flossing. Instead of making X's on a calendar, I kept a list of my
debt, from smallest to largest balances. As I paid off each one, I took great
pride in ripping up the last bill and drawing a red line through the account
name.

With my
new habits, I was paying down my debt systematically. I finally felt at peace
with money.

Five
months into my money challenge, my new habits became second nature. And I felt
such a sense of relief when I started to notice that the habits were becoming
second nature -- money wasn't so scary anymore. Previously, when I wasn't
looking at my finances, there was always anxiety around not having enough
money. But with my new habits, I was checking in regularly and paying down my
debt systematically. I finally felt at peace with money, and 18 months later, I
was debt-free.

Think about it, she accomplished all that without a glimmer
of insight into why she had let the debt accumulate, without the least bit of
awareness about why she had failed to manage her finances and without even getting
touch with her feelings.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

No one seems to know who first said it first, but we do
get the government we deserve. It may not be the one we thought we were voting
for, but that is the peril of democracy.

The American people, Ross Douthat reports, want their
government to deal with jobs, the economy, entitlements, health care costs… you
know, the nation’s most important problems.

The Obama administration is focused on gun control,
immigration and climate control.

For their part, Congressional Republicans have been busy
trying to destroy themselves over immigration.

Douthat calls it “the great disconnect” and he explains that
the Obama administration has gotten caught up in the kind of fashionable
liberal thought that is associated with New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Apparently, Obama has dispensed with calls for social
justice and has glommed on to the favorite causes of the lefty 1 %. Would you
reject a chance to belong to the new American aristocracy?

Douthat describes what he aptly calls Bloombergism:

… gun
control, immigration reform and climate change aren’t just random targets of
opportunity. They’re pillars of Acela Corridor ideology, core elements of
Bloombergism, places where Obama-era liberalism overlaps with the views of
Davos-goers and the Wall Street 1 percent. If you move in those circles, the
political circumstances don’t necessarily matter: these ideas always look like
uncontroversial common sense.

For those of you who do not inhabit the great cosmopolitan
metropolis I would point out that as Mayor Mike completes his twelve year term,
minority youth unemployment is over 40%, but we are supposed to be consoling ourselves with
rent-a-bike stations that have popped up around the city.

If you buy a subscription you can take one of these shiny
new silver and blue bicycles out for a ride. You can return it to any
rent-a-bike station you choose. It beats taking the subway to work.

Don’t you dream of riding a bicycle through the streets of
Manhattan during rush hour traffic? Don’t you want to arrive at work sweaty and
unkempt after having sucked up the carbon monoxide and other pollutants that
cling to New York’s streets?

While the mayor agonizes over Big Gulps his crack scientists
ignored the fact that exercising on New York’s polluted streets will cause you
to absorb so many toxic chemicals that it will neutralize the value of your
exercise.

The Obama administration attack on global warming also seems poorly timed. All major newspapers have reported that the
climate has not warmed during the past fifteen years. We humans have spewed
massive amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere during this time and the
climate has shrugged.

These facts have embarrassed the global warming crowd. It
has called on its minions to keep the faith, because the global climate
apocalypse is nigh.

As I have occasionally noted, the global warmists are more
prophets than scientists. There is no such thing as a scientific fact about
what will happen tomorrow, to say nothing of what will happen a century from
now. To think otherwise is to be ignorant of science.

GLOBAL
warming has
slowed. The rate of warming of over the past 15 years has been lower than
that of the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt that our planet
continues to heat, but it has heated less than most climate scientists had
predicted. Nate
Cohn of the New Republic reports: "Since
1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up
with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously
close to falling beneath even the lowest projections".

Mr Cohn
does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming
has not abated, as does Brad
Plumer of the Washington Post,
as does this
newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the
planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and
emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of
greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these
policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound
of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense
of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain
advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public,
which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment
has cried wolf.

The Economist blogger does accept that global warming might
heat up again, but he rcommends that we also consider the effects of the
policies that have been proposed to fix the problem:

Dramatic
warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in
poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming
may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible
humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed
complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set
of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in
order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models,
while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world
to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather
may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to
wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often
met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus.

Yes, indeed. It is certainly the case that scientific facts
are not determined by taking a poll of scientists. The fact that scientists are
promoting global warming as dogma ought to provoke more than a goodly amount of
skepticism.

Scientists are perplexed and puzzled by the new data, but
not as much as the policy makers who follow the lead of the 1%ers whose class consciousness requires them to adhere
strictly to the same dogmas and to indulge in the Bloombergian version of
noblesse oblige:

As a
rule, climate scientists were previously very confident that the planet would be warmer than it is
by now, and no one knows for sure why it isn't. This isn't a crisis for climate
science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their
arguments on the authority of scientific consensus.

When it comes to global warming, the new aristocracy is
trafficking in a big lie. The Economist blogger explains:

If this
is true, then the public has been systematically deceived. As it has been
presented to the public, the scientific consensus extended precisely to that
which is now seems to be in question: the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric
carbon dioxide. Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases
have some warming
effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all.

The blogger concludes:

The
moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and
global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus
about how much warming there would be if carbon
emissions continue on trend. The rather heated debates we have had about
the likely economic and social damage of carbon emissions have been based on
that idea that there is something like a scientific consensus about the
range of warming we can
expect. If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is,
for good or ill, a very big deal.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Normally, when we want to know the state of the nation’s
economy we go to the numbers. Until recently, the numbers have been fairly
good.

The stock market had soared. The bond market had been tamed.
Unemployment had been coming down.

All in all, it was sufficient to get Barack Obama
re-elected. And it made Ben Bernanke look like a wizard.

Yet, things were not as they seemed. Mort Zuckerman, among
others, has been exclaiming that we must look beneath unemployment numbers.
When we do we discover that labor force participation is anemic and that
underemployment is becoming increasingly common.

Something was rotten at the core of the great economic
recovery.

Of late, the bond market has signaled that the
Bernanke/Obama recovery is in trouble. When your nation is in debt up to its
eyeballs a crashing bond market is the last thing you need.

For years, Bernanke was fighting the bond market by printing
money. Of late, it seems that he is going to lose the fight. The bond market
has been refusing to play with Ben’s funny money.

Of course, there’s more to life and to an economy than
numbers. Whatever you think about the blizzard of numbers that quantify the
employment situation, it is useful from time to time to ask yourself how real
people feel about their jobs.

Are American workers committed to their jobs? Are they
dedicated to their companies? Are they doing their best to produce the best
products and provide the best services?

Or, are American workers discontented, disgruntled and
disaffected to the point of not really caring about anything more than getting
off work?

Gallup recently did a survey and discovered that, beneath
the numbers the American worker was in a foul mood. Clearly, it has been damaging
business and the economy.

Among
the 100 million people in this country who hold full-time jobs, about 70
percent of them either hate going to work or have mentally checked out to the
point of costing their companies money — “roaming the halls spreading
discontent,” as Gallup reported. Only 30 percent of workers are “engaged and
inspired” at work.

And also:

Gallup’s
current survey, covering two years, is a follow-up to an earlier poll that
found much the same level of passive discontent from 2008 to 2010. Even in an
improving economy, people are adrift at work, complaining about a lack of
praise, with no sense of mission, and feeling little loyalty to their employer.

The numbers are staggering. If most American workers hate
their jobs and are merely going through the motions, then the economy is
dysfunctional in ways we do not appreciate.

Many serious thinkers believe that the problem lies in the
disconnection between executive salaries and worker salaries. The gulf between
the two has never been wider.

Egan entertained this explanation:

You
would think the usual suspects were to blame for this sea of seething in the
cubicles of America. While productivity per worker has soared over the last two
decades, pay has remained flat or gone down. The gulf between those at the very
top and those who do all the heavy lifting has never been greater. Too many
corporations, especially in a tight job market, promote a view that everyone is
replaceable; the workers are mercenaries with bottom-of-the-bin benefits. Take
it or leave it.

Those who accept this analysis believe that the problem can
be solved by confiscatory taxes on the rich and more labor unions.

Yet, the people surveyed by Gallup did not complain about
wage inequality and social injustice. They hated the way they were being
managed. They hated being treated as cogs in a machine and not as human beings.

Egan explained:

But
here’s the surprise: the main factor in workplace discontent is not wages,
benefits or hours, but the boss. … The survey said there was consistent anger
at management types who failed to so much as ask employees about their opinion
of the job. Ever.

“The
managers from hell are creating active disengagement costing the United States
an estimated $450 billion to $550 billion annually,” wrote Jim Clifton, the
C.E.O. and chairman of Gallup.

Regular
praise, opportunity for growth, and the occasional question from a higher-up of
a lower-down about how to improve things would go a long way toward getting the
checked-out to check back in, the study found. Among those who loathe their
jobs most, 57 percent said they were ignored at work, and 41 percent said they
couldn’t even say what their company stood for. As such, there’s no mystery why
customer service is so bad, or being farmed out to robots.

Let’s see. The country is awash in management gurus. The
nation’s business schools all teach courses in management. All companies rely
on management consultants.

And yet, almost nobody knows how to manage human beings.

For all I know the management courses are so completely quantified that they do not teach the
essentials of good management. They do not explain the importance of productive
relationships, of face-to-face conversation, of praise and recognition.

I find it hard to believe that business schools fail to
teach the importance of informing all employees of the company mission, of
helping them to understand how their work contributes, of asking
them for their suggestions about how everyone can do a better job.

If they do, then students have clearly missed the point.

It’s also possible that relationships between people in
American companies are so completely regulated by bureaucracy and the threat of
lawsuits that no manager dares treat his staff as human beings.